I hope you’ve enjoyed A Love Forbidden. It was a very interesting if challenging story to tell. I did, however, want to clarify a few details for historical accuracy.
Shiloh, Jesse, the Wainwrights, Kwana, Onawa, and Broken Antler are all fictional characters. All the other characters mentioned in regard to the White River Indian Agency were real people, as were all the events leading up to the Meeker Massacre on September 29, 1879. Josie Meeker was actually the only schoolteacher at the Agency, and I of course took literary license with the interactions and dialogue between Shiloh, Jesse, and the other Agency personnel, as well as with them and the Utes. Only three women—Josie, Arvilla, and Flora Ellen in addition to her two children—were actually taken captive by the Utes.
After the Meeker Massacre, things didn’t go well for the White River Utes. Though the Utes who’d fought the soldiers at Milk Creek were never prosecuted, as the fight was deemed a legitimate battle, attempts were made to apprehend, try, and punish the Utes who’d killed innocent people at the Agency. However, though Arvilla, Josie, and Flora Ellen named twelve Utes whom they’d recognized during the massacre, none of the White River Utes would testify that they knew anything about the massacre or who had participated in it.
Even after Ouray got involved, only Chief Douglas was eventually brought in and punished by being imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was eventually set free and died insane, sometime later.
The residents of Colorado, however, were still up in arms and demanded that “The Utes must go!” Eventually, Ouray hammered out a treaty with the US government, and on September 1, 1881, the White River Utes began a 350-mile march to the Utah reservation—a “wild and ragged desolation valuable for nothing unless it shall be found to contain mineral deposits.” Brokenhearted, the Utes left the lush, green Shining Mountains of their ancestral homelands in Colorado, forbidden to return.
Ouray never saw his people’s banishment from Colorado. He died on August 24, 1880, of what was believed to be kidney disease.